The main word that comes to mind about Sunday’s win (well, apart from YESSSSSSSS!!) is ‘mentality’. I’m certainly not going to sit here and make the case that this Manchester United side is anything better than the 7th place it currently occupies in the Premier League table, and the ease with which Liverpool won 3-0 without ever coming out of the lower gears probably owed as much to their general poverty of thought, ambition and imagination as it did to the away side’s organisation, ability and tactical awareness on the day. Even so, they still had to be beaten, and history is littered with too many good (sometimes great) teams that didn’t do what they were supposed to at crucial times for me to simply dismiss it as nothing more than a standard three points. The run that Liverpool have been on since the Norwich game on the 4th of December has truly been spectacular (16 games, 12 wins, 51 goals), but it’s easy to forget now that it was immediately preceded by that ugly 1-3 loss at Hull. If a win on Sunday was only to be expected against a relatively poor Manchester United side, then what of that fixture at the KC Stadium at the start of December? The difference now is that Liverpool are typically winning these games, and often without having to overly stretch themselves. Even when they don’t play well, potential draws and losses are being turned into wins more often not.
In the three and a half months since that loss to Hull, we’ve seen plenty of evidence to suggest that the mental toughness which defines all successful teams has begun to permeate Brendan Rodgers and his players. There’s been comebacks (e.g. from 0-2 down against Villa; 0-1 and 1-2 against Fulham), winning goals in testing circumstances (e.g. lost a 2-0 lead at Stoke, won 5-3; Gerrard’s late penalty at Fulham; lost 2-0 and 3-2 leads against Swansea, won 4-3) and, perhaps most of all, an almost contemptuous disregard for trends and recent history. While his beleaguered opposite number on Sunday, David Moyes, has been stockpiling unwanted milestones all over the place during his reign at Old Trafford so far (e.g. first wins there in years for West Brom, Everton, Newcastle and Swansea), Rodgers has been amassing a much more impressive collection of landmarks at Anfield. The 5-0 at White Hart Lane in December, for example, flew in the face of a measly 5 wins out of 23 at Tottenham’s ground going back to 1992, including 6 straight losses; the 5-3 win over Stoke in January not only marked Liverpool’s first League win at the Brittania since Stoke’s promotion back in 2008, in one game his team more than doubled the amount of goals scored in 5 previous visits there; the Everton game marked the biggest margin of victory in a Merseyside Derby since 1982; Arsenal were unbeaten on their previous 5 visits to Anfield and had lost just 4 out of 15 there in all competitions stretching back to 2001 before the 5-1 demolition at the start of February; and we had lost on our 3 previous visits to St. Mary’s before the game earlier this month, with Southampton also having won at Anfield back in September for good measure.
Sunday’s win was another milestone along the way. Not for the first time this season, Liverpool conceived and executed a performance that was a throwback to another era, one where a quarter-century wait for the return of the League title to Anfield would have been simply unfathomable. And while it may not seem particularly striking when set alongside some of the attacking prowess we’ve seen demonstrated this season in games against the likes of Arsenal, Tottenham and Everton, and the result itself may not feel as significant as the one at St. Mary’s two weeks ago in a fixture where many of us expected a Liverpool slip-up, it nonetheless somehow feels like the most important one of the lot both as a standalone game and in the wider context of where Liverpool is going as a club. Regardless of the man sitting on the home bench or his club’s drastically diminished prowess this season, regardless of the compelling evidence provided by the first 28 games that Liverpool are simply a better team, this fixture still carries with it a natural sense of dread for many supporters. Some were even heard to say beforehand that they’d take a draw because this was Manchester United, the champions, at Old Trafford and they were sure to raise their game against Liverpool of all teams. It can be argued that maybe Moyes’ team simply isn’t capable of raising their game against anything but the kind of meek opposition offered by Olympiakos last night, but the truth is that they simply weren’t allowed to on Sunday. I had been feeling confident going in, all the more so when I saw United’s line-up, but with Sturridge firing a shot wide after just two minutes and Suárez forcing Fellaini to bring him down (twice) after five, it was clear that Liverpool were a few classes above their opponents. Hard tackles by Gerrard and Flanagan early-on only added to this sense, and by the time Flanno dropped the shoulder and sauntered past Mata midway through the first half, it was all becoming beautifully surreal.
It seems a long time ago now since Gérard Houllier said “we will beat them one day, I promise you that” about Manchester United after his team’s heart-breaking FA Cup defeat at Old Trafford in January 1999 (having led for 86 minutes after Michael Owen’s early header, he had just watched his team succumb to two late goals in two minutes right at the end). In real terms it’s been just over 15 years, but on Sunday it felt like several lifetimes ago. Houllier’s words in the aftermath of that gut-wrenching loss were an understandable attempt to lift his players, his supporters and his club by looking to better days in the future, but the subtext was a little bit harder to swallow. It suggested that our goals, at least for the time-being, could be distilled down into the prospect of single victories over our main rivals rather than trophies, the same trophies they were chasing at Old Trafford, the same ones that had once been the only true barometer of success at Anfield. This impression was only confirmed by the celebrations from the away side following victory at the same ground just under two years later, when Danny Murphy’s first-half free-kick made Houllier’s promise come true. It was as though a trophy had been won. Between Houllier’s final season and last Sunday’s game, a span of approximately 10 years, we played 11 games at Old Trafford, losing 10 and only winning 1, similar to our record there prior to that win in December 2000 when it had been 12 without a win in all competitions since a 2-1 win there in March 1990 (and leaving aside that famous 4-1 victory in March 2009, we only scored 6 in 10 visits during that span). And yet there were no celebrations out of the ordinary, no inkling that anyone thought any more of the result than Jordan Henderson did: “It was a big win but it was just another game for us really”.
That’s a mentality that you could take a jackhammer to and barely make the slightest scratch. Allied to the pace and ability further forward, the leadership offered by the captain (which simply oozed out of Old Trafford on Sunday) and the manager, and the sheer tactical flexibility which made Moyes’ 4-4-2 seem even more boring, limited and predictable than usual on Sunday, it makes Liverpool a hugely dangerous team.
